Let's be honest and acknowledge that we are seeing a rapid movement

[Uncle Joe]

Link to tweet

[JoeOtterbein]

1. K n R ! Thanks for posting!

[OhNo-Really]

19. This scares me hugely

‪Coup 101 - All 4 Military Branch Secretaries Replaced Since July 11, 2019‬ following Moscow visit by 8 Congressmen

‪https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212728232‬

[redqueen]

22. That doesn't sound good at all. Link is broken though - weird. The one below works.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212728232

[dlk]

2. Extreme gerrymandering has allowed Republicans to pick their voters

Time and again, Republicans have demonstrated they don't hold the values our country was founded on.

[Uncle Joe]

6. Corporate power in state legislatures produces a gerrymandered Congress

In January 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowed corporations, for the first time ever, to spend unlimited money on politics. Within a few months, Republican strategists and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hatched a plan to take advantage of the newly available corporate cash. They called it Project “RedMap,” or “Redistricting Majority Project.” Its goal was to use corporate money— much of it contributed secretly through the Chamber— to win Republican control of state legislatures in the Fall of 2010. That year’s elections were particularly important because the officials who came into office that year would be charged with redrawing legislative district boundaries based on the 2010 census.

The business lobbyists were more successful than they could have hoped. With their help, eleven states that had previously been governed by a combination of Democrats and Republicans became wall-to-wall Republican, with the GOP controlling both houses of the legislature along with the Governor’s mansion. Critically, this included a swath of traditional swing states with strong labor movements running from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin across the upper Midwest.

It’s not surprising that corporate money would have an outsized effect in state politics. Few people pay attention to state politics—less than one-quarter of Americans even know who their state representative is— so there’s less opposition to the moneyed interests. And legislative races are relatively cheap to buy. In North Carolina, for instance, supermarket magnate and Koch brothers’ affiliate Art Pope contributed $2.3 million to 20 favored candidates in 2010— effectively doubling these candidates’ campaign budgets. Eighty percent of Pope’s candidates won, and with his help, Republicans gained control of both houses of the North Carolina legislature for the first time since the Reconstruction.

(snip)

November 2010, Project “Red-Map”
Corporate Money Helps Republicans Gain Wall-to-Wall Control in 11 New States


(snip)

But the corporate investment in politics has paid dividends at the federal level as well as in the states. A recent study from the Brennan Center for Justice reports that when state legislators redrew the lines for Congressional Districts, they engaged in such severe gerrymandering that the GOP now holds 17 seats that would have been won by Democrats if the district boundaries were fairly drawn.[1] In the current Congress, Democrats would need to win a total of twenty-four Republican-held seats in order to regain the majority. But most of this gap is the product of gerrymandering; if the districts were impartial, Democrats would be only seven seats away from a majority.

(snip)

https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-power-in-state-legislatures-produces-a-gerrymandered-congress/

[LanternWaste]

16. Post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacy.

[dlk]

21. Correlation may not necessarily be causation, but sometimes it is...

[redqueen]

3. K&R

Distressing to see this just keeps getting worse, and that more and more people seem to be fine with it.

[Thekaspervote]

4. If the young people in this country would consistently vote... it would change

Might not be perfect but it would be a whole lot better

[redqueen]

5. If we give them candidates who say they are whining

and deserve no empathy, or that seem to be the same old same old hypocritical / lying politician type, what can we expect?

[awesomerwb1]

9. I'll take those candidates over trump

any day of the week.

Any voter that can't see what trump is doing not just to this country but to the planet and chooses not to vote for a Democratic nominee no matter who he is (except tulsi for me) DESERVES what pain and misery trump brings them.

[redqueen]

14. I will too. I'd take a potted plant over Trump.

But I'm not talking about people like us. People who are already engaged, who already pay attention, who already know the reality behind the media spin.

I'm talking about those who aren't. And don't. We need their votes.

[Amimnoch]

25. If they voted en masse, they wouldn't need to be "given" a damn thing.

They want change, get the fuck out and vote for it.

At the end of the day,
Campaign contributions don’t actually get a vote,
PAC’s don’t actually get a vote,
Corporate donations and lobbies don’t get a vote.

FFS, it’s not even as limited as it was just 25 years ago..
Today, they don’t have a handful of network channels and news sources that they’re limited to. In minutes they can see the actual voting record of their candidates, actual quotes, actual campaign contribution data.. just by hopping online and looking it up.

Such a sad paradox that the information age seems to generate exceptionally low information voters.

[redqueen]

27. You don't seem to realize how many see the entire process as rigged

You can rant and rave over the unfairness and sadness but what we need to do is deal with it.

[betsuni]

34. I love this comment.

[Voltaire2]

8. Yeah those yutes. All their fault.

[LaurenOlimina]

26. Yeah, that's what this op is about, young people.

[BlueWI]

30. What about the older people who have voted for 40-50 years?

What's their excuse? The system we see is an outcome of those decisions. Blaming people left behind when the last boat to the middle class sailed long ago is a reverse agist fail.

[redqueen]

40. And sadly it's not an uncommon sentiment. nt

[Voltaire2]

7. It is where we were in the late 19th century.

And this time the oligarchs have all the tools of totalitarian propaganda welded onto social media to keep them in power.

It is not a good place to be.

[themaguffin]

10. Yes, but trump is president & any that is how it musted be framed

[James48]

11. Sick to my stomach

That’s why I’m with Bernie.

[TwilightZone]

12. It's nothing new.

Money has been involved in politics as long as money and politics have existed.

The US, in particular, has always been that way. It was set up to favor rich, white landholders.

Then, there was the Robber Baron Era.

None of this is new, and it's not a drastic change.

[Uncle Joe]

13. "Old news" right?

Of course money has been involved with politics since money and politics existed.

Our nation has run through cycles of big money totally dominating our national and state governments but what is your suggestion or point other than stating this is "nothing new?"

The first cycle at the birth or our nation that you mentioned eventually lead to Civil War.

My point is just because we pulled out of those previous cycles of big money domination doesn't mean we will always pull out of it.

Every empire in world history has eventually fallen and in the vast majority of cases, those falls can be traced to rampant corruption rotting them from the inside.

[TwilightZone]

17. My point is that it's not recent.

My point is that we're not rapidly approaching anything - we're already there. We've been there for decades. The current trend dates to a decade before Citizens United, at least 20 years. CU just made it official.

The money spent on elections has been steadily trending upward for decades. The 2012 election was in the $2 billion range, just for the presidency.

Wealthy people and special interest groups? Yeah, welcome to 2000. Or look up Ross Perot.

[Uncle Joe]

18. The lead up to our nation's deadliest war took 72 years but we don't have that much time.

Unless one believes that anthropogenic global warming climate change is just a hoax.

In our nation's two hundred and thirty years of existence, the last thirty years or so is relatively recent and Citizens United which only happened 10 years ago made a bad situation worse.

[redqueen]

28. +1,000

We are way past 'same as it ever was'.

[TwilightZone]

35. You're intentionally missing the point.

Sanders says we're moving toward a political system where the rich and the special interests control the political sphere.

Moving toward? Nope, already there. Been there for decades. If he just had an epiphany, he's about 20 years too late.

He does stuff like this all the time. He acts as though he's made some incredible revelation when it's common knowledge and been self-evident for not only years but decades. His supporters then act as if the topic never saw the light of day before Sanders brought it up.

Sanders has been in Congress for nearly 30 years. What legislation has he sponsored and gotten through Congress to address any of this?

[Uncle Joe]

37. Apparently you haven't been paying attention to Bernie's consistent message

regarding wealth/income disparity since the mid 1980s.

Our dysfunctional wealth/income disparities and the 1%'s stranglehold on politicians, politics and policies that Bernie has been warning about since "Back to the Future" first came out are precisely why he hasn't been more successful in passing much needed legislation, it has been a lonely fight but I do believe the times are a changing.

Thanks in large part to the Internet and the instantaneous, mass, two way flow and dissemination of information the times are catching up with Bernie.

[TwilightZone]

43. So, nothing. Got it.

So, he's been talking about it for 30 years but hasn't been able to convince his peers of anything.

Meanwhile, Democrats not named Bernie Sanders have also been addressing income inequality for decades. Efforts have been made in education for low-income families, healthcare, infrastructure spending, tax and monetary policy, minimum wages, and countless other areas.

Is it enough? Nope. Were all of the efforts successful? Nope. But the assertion that Sanders is the only one talking about income inequality and that no one else talked about it or did anything about it over the past 30+ years is ridiculous.

I often wonder if the people who make those assertions were politically active before 2015. Ever heard of Ted Kennedy?

[Blue_true]

24. Exactly.

Congressmen (there were no women until toward the middle of the last century), were all powerful men of the legal profession or from well connected rich families.

The government is actually more representative today than it has been in the country's history. If we want that to become better, we need to set aside our differences and religiously vote for the Democratic Party nominee in every race.

[BlueWI]

32. You're kidding, right?

Three men (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet) own more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans.

Name another time in modern history when this was true.

Way too much complacency about wealth inequality even among Democrats. At least Sanders, Warren, and Yang call out the problem, which is structural, and if you follow the data, the trends are not in favor of the common person or the increasingly shrinking middle class.

If we don't fight on this issue, no one will.

[TwilightZone]

36. No one is downplaying wealth inequality.

The point is that this isn't some huge revelation that no one brought to attention before Sanders decided to bring it up in a tweet. His argument that we're working toward a system where the rich and special interests control politics is about 20 years too late. It's already here and has been for decades. Citizens United just made it official.

As for historic inequality, I suspect that the victims of the slave trade would argue that inequality was greater for the first 90 or so years of our existence than it is now. And women. And minorities. How about Native Americans? The Robber Baron Era?

This is not new. The United States was founded on inequality and has a history of inequality. The assertion that present-day inequality is something shockingly new or something uniquely historic is nonsense.

[BlueWI]

46. Name the historical stat that compares to what I cited.

When the USA was founded, there were only 13 colonies, with the size of the continental land mass, independent indigenous nations, maroons of escaped enslaved people, abundant natural resources, and a federal government with hardly any reach making the comparison, then to now, largely meaningless.

Sure, many on DU take any opportunity to bash Bernie Sanders, one of only a few candidates that take wealth concentration seriously. You say no one is downplaying this, before you downplay it yourself with the ahistorical comparison to the 18th century US.

Citizens United, dark money, unregulated capital, the depletion of resources, and the lack of a consensus economic policy all contribute to the massive problem of inequality. But don't take my word for it. Stop by any of the massive tent cities that surround any metropolitan area, in the US or abroad. Ask anyone whose disenfranchised by this system of concentrated wealth if they're expecting the next industrial or information revolution to lift them up. Or minimally, point to any statistical or policy trend with promise to change the current directions.

Thanks in advance.

[sandensea]

15. And if not in 2020 - then almost certainly in 2024

After Cheeto pushes us all into another Dubya-style debacle.

Maybe that's what it'll take, sadly. Let's not bail the banksters out this time though.

[MarcA]

20. It's certainly accelerating and becoming more entrenched. n/t

[Blue_true]

23. The country was founded by rich men.

Look across the Founders and then read up on each. Every single one was rich, either import/export company owners, Probting company owners, plantation owners, shipping company owners. There was not a poor man among the bunch. Government is actually more representative of all of society than it was during the Founders' time and even for more that two centuries after.

[Uncle Joe]

29. It depends on whether one counts Thomas Paine or the men and women that fought and/or died

during the Revolution as founders or not.

The government dominated by the wealthy and not living up to its' stated ideals led to the deadliest war our nation has ever known 72 years later.

Today with anthropogenic global warming climate change taking hold, we don't have anything near like 72 years to get our only home in the universe in order.

[Blue_true]

31. Thomas Paine was a wealthy craftsman.

The people who actually fought and died were mostly average people, except for the few commanders that died in fights.

I see the point that you want to make, the wealthy are absorbing more and more of the country's wealth. It is just that I see more complex reasons for that than collusive scheming by the rich (although, that is certainly part of the mix). The effect of robotics and AI is being talked about by only one candidate, Yang. The increasing use of robots and AI has had two major impacts, IMO, the use has depressed wages majorly and it has increased income inequality and failure of small businesses that can't afford robots and AI. Hillary Clinton proposed a tax on robots and AI and I felt that was an excellent idea. I also favor up to a maximum 50% tax on gross profits and would want that tax to be truly progressive such that companies that are making massive gross profits pay more dollars in taxes. I view a wealth tax as problematic due to issues with how it would need to be applied.

[Uncle Joe]

33. Thomas Paine barely avoided debtors' prison, he was more middle class than wealthy.

As for "scheming," it doesn't really take much, that's just the natural dynamics of our current dysfunctional political system wherein big money has increasingly bought elections and political/policy influence over the greater needs of the public good for decades.

It has been "death by a thousand cuts."

[Blue_true]

38. Payne was a tailor and writer (an editor).

His mom was from a wealthy family. But you are right, he did have to sell his house to pay off debt in England before coming to the colonies. But soon after arriving in the colonies he became editor of a prominent circular and a little later wrote a best selling pamphlet on the need for seperation from England. During that era, selling 80,000 to 125,000 of a piece of literature was the economic equivalent of selling ten times that number today, so he was not poor.

After you challenged me, I took some time and read more details about him. I see why you like him. He hated forced inequity among people and he had a revolutionary mindset (overthrow the powers that be to make things better for the common person).

[Uncle Joe]

39. I didn't say he was poor, but middle class.

Peace to you Blue true.

[Blue_true]

42. See you tomorrow Uncle Joe, I am turning in early tonight. nt

[Blue_true]

41. I agree with your point on the political system.

Everyday people don't have lobbyists walking the halls of legislative bodies daily and getting meetings with politicians. AOC pointed out the shame of lobbyist paying homeless people peanuts to stand in hearing lines for them, so that the lobbyists could go off and do other things but still get before politicians.

So yes, the system is loaded against the common person. But the issue is how do we change that system, that is where you and I have repeatedly crossed swords. I am ok with gradual change if we are always moving forward, you seem to prefer revolutionary change (which I see no instances of having worked to produce the utopia that thinkers like you want the world at).

[Uncle Joe]

44. I will leave you with this and then I'm turning in as well.

To my way of thinking we have practiced incremental-ism or moderation for at least 30 to 40 years and I used to be more comfortable with that approach as well but it seems to me for every step forward we have taken over the past forty years two have been taken back on a host of critical issues and I see time as running out for life as we know it.

I don't have any children and frankly I'm comfortable from an economic point of view, my health care is covered through the VA but I'm greatly worried about virtually everyone else whether it be increased poverty which I see on a daily basis, our planet which is turning ever more inhospitable to human life, and major dysfunctional systems whether it be health care, wealth/income disparity, a racist criminal justice system or the funding of politics just to name a few.

If you wish me to elaborate more on my thoughts tomorrow, I could write an essay but I'm getting sleepy now.

[myohmy2]

45. it's called capitalism...

"...a handful of very wealthy people and special interests determine who gets elected..."

...everything in this country and system has been reduced to money, everything...

...and who has the money?...the wealthy...

...what haven't we privatized and monetized over the last 50 years?

...why would elections now be any different?

...it's high time we regain control with leaders that aren't dedicated to wall street...

...